Prof Louise Milne
| Biography | Louise Milne is a visual anthropologist, a film-maker and a leading scholar in comparative mythology and the history of dreams. Born on Lewis, Louise studied at King's College Cambridge and Boston University, Mass. She has been working and teaching in Edinburgh since the mid-1990s, playing an instrumental role in the development of various undergraduate and graduate programmes, at Edinburgh College of Art and Edinburgh Napier University. Since 2015, she is Associate Professor of Film at Napier. Among her scholarly contributions is Carnivals & Dreams: Pieter Bruegel and the History of the Imagination, a comprehensive study on the 16th century artist, the research for which was funded by a Leverhulme Fellowship. A second fully revised edition, in preparation, has funding from the Carnegie and Scouloudi trusts. Alongside her academic work, Louise makes experimental films and documentaries. Her first film, Lanterna Magicka was supported by the BFI and Channel 4. Subsequently, her films have been selected for international festivals, in the UK, Europe, Scandinavia and the Americas; she is a regular contributor to the Alchemy Film Festival in Scotland, and the Maine Film International Festival, which screened a retrospective of Lanterna Magicka films in 2017. Her documentary about a Lewis fishing boat, A Boat Retold (2011), was short-listed for a Royal Anthropological Institute Film Prize. Her most recent filmwork includes a trilogy of experimental films (Mnemosyne, Eidolon and Hypnos) shot largely on Super8, the feature-length documentary Charlie Chaplin's London (2019), and two films on Andrei Tarkovsky, commissioned by Criterion, Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev: A Journey (2018) and The Dream in The Mirror (2021). Appointed to the Board of the International Association of Comparative Mythology, she is also an editor of the Journal of Comparative Mythology, Chief Editor of Cosmos, and President of the Traditional Cosmology Society. She has represented the University at public events and festivals, and appeared as a BBC broadcaster. |
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| Research Interests | Louise’s research has three main foci: a) the evolution and interrelations of dream-representation and imagery in the visual and other media; b) dream-culture as a contested arena; the power politics of the imaginary, the visionary and the supernatural; c) a framework for experimental documentary film-making (including the study of dreams in popular and avant-garde cinema, and in the theory of cinema and its cultures). She is interested in dream cultures as a laboratory for critical theory enabling us to come from new angles at problems such as the relationship between artwork and social context, or the origins of language and art. Her work is therefore interdisciplinary, comprising elements of visual anthropology, art history, comparative mythology, psychoanalytic theory and creative practice. |
| Teaching and Learning | 2015- Associate Professor (Reader) of Film, Edinburgh Napier University/Screen Academy Scotland |